Tag: clone

We’ve been focused this whole time on games which attempted to emulate the 2D overhead perspective style Zelda games. The time has finally come to talk about one of the few games which tried out the more modern 3D style. One of the final games released in the Mana series, Dawn of Mana attempted something brand new to its franchise. Using Ocarina of Time–and similar subsequent games in the Zelda series–as a blueprint, Dawn of Mana attempted to follow Zelda…

For the past few weeks we’ve been talking about Zelda clones that defy the label and are actually quite good. Well, the time has come to talk about probably the worst Zelda clone ever released. And the fact that it was never supposed to have been. It has a strange and complicated history, but if you ever searched for “Zelda” in the iPhone App Store–hoping against hope that there would somehow be an actual Zelda game in there–you’ve probably come…

When talking about Zelda clones, the usual suspects make the list: Neutopia, Okami, 3D Dot Game Heroes. Yet somehow one of the biggest “offenders” is often overlooked. Lagoon was a game released on the Super Nintendo before A Link to the Past, so the notion of a 16-bit Zelda was still just a dream to we Zelda fans of the day. So when the main arrived and in it was a special Nintendo Power-published catalogue of upcoming Super Nintendo games…

Since we’re already out of chronology, I may as well leap past some of the older 8-bit Zelda clones for now and focus on a much more recent retro-styled 16-bit game created as freeware to be played on your PC. And if the picture to the left didn’t make it obvious enough, this game is clearly based not just on the Zelda series in general, but A Link to the Past specifically. This week we’ll be talking about the Zelda…

While I had said last week that my intention for this week was to return back to chronology of Zelda clones in roughly the order in which they were released, I was preparing for the next episode of a similar series (albeit a video one) on Zelda clones on my YouTube channel… and that episode was on the topic of The Legend of Spyro trilogy… so I decided to kill two Keese with one arrow and just use that research…

My intentions were to sort of follow the basic chronology of the Zelda clones, doing all the early 8 and 16-bit ones first and working my way up to the newer ones. But then Evoland happened. And while in many ways it is in an entirely different genre of video games (meta? Is that a genre?) it is absolutely a Zelda clone to point that it basically tells the technical history of Zelda (and by extension all action-adventure games) up…

Welcome back to Empty Elegy, where we take a look at various Zelda clones from the ages and see just how close they come to “borrowing” from our favorite franchise, and what ways they either tried to improve upon it or simply tried out some new ideas and used Zelda as a starting point and then forged their own path. This week is a bit more of the later. While definitely very inspired by Zelda, this particular title was also…

Zelda clones. They get a bad rap. Sometimes deservedly so. As we discussed in our post last week, sometimes clones are made out of sheer love for our favorite series. Other times they are simply made to cash in on Nintendo’s ideas. One such clone, Neutopia, is the latter, and is one of the very first (but not the first) Zelda clones made. It shares so much in common with the original Legend of Zelda that it is shocking the…

Our great friends at Zelda Universe have come across an unusual find. A game is in development for portable Apple devices and may seem a bit too familiar to Zelda fans. While the game is not related to the Zelda franchise in anyway, it does share some common ground with a few games from the series. The all touch controls, cartoon style graphics, heart containers, and top down view of a young boy with a sword definitely brings Wind Waker,…